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Adbusters Suggests Click Fraud As Protest
An anonymous reader writes "In response to Google's recently announced plans to expand the tracking of users, the international anti-advertising magazine Adbusters proposes that we collectively embark on a civil disobedience campaign of intentional, automated 'click fraud' in order to undermine Google's advertising program in order to force Google to adopt a pro-privacy corporate policy. They have released a GreaseMonkey script that automatically clicks on all AdSense ads."
Won't this just make Google more money?
It's not like the advertisers can go somewhere else. If you want search ads, there's only one place to go.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Actually, I think I already have Google ads blocked...
Will false-positives hurt them more than just adblocking them?
Buckle your ROFL belt, we're in for some LOLs.
to just filter out anyone that clicks on all the adword links on a given page considering that maybe 5% of users actually click on ALL of the advertisements?
i think this is stupid, but it's just my $0.02...
aEN
I think the better approach is to give Google the finger and start using other tools.
Isn't adblock enough? I hate advertising, but as long as I can opt out it's OK with me.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If I was an AdWords user, I would pull all of my bids now and let other advertisers exhausted theirs first.
Then a "word" will be easier and cheaper to get.
Virtual Betting on Facebook for non-geeks.
We're talking about tagging cookies to a browser, keeping data browser-end, and having the browser send data back to the server for statistics when ads are served.
Instead, we could skip the cookies. Keep the data on the server, in a database, tied to your IP address and other information collected about you (OS, browser, time of day, etc) and do much more extensive research.
When you clear your cookies, you're removed from Google's "Database" ... YOU are requesting THEM to send you ads based on information YOU are tracking using THEIR program. THEY are not tracking everything you do, because damn, it'd be hard to uniquely identify you when your cookies expire and drop your UUID stored in a cookie and they wind up with 40 database entries for your ONE browser because you clear cookies every session.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
smells like a lawsuit coming soon....
Don't know how google are expected to continue providing free search, maps, mail and all, if they can't get revenue from somewhere else. Ads work for tv and radio, and apparently for web, too.
We have all seen the "make $10,000 a day using adsense" - won't this only increase the ad revenue for these potential scams and in turn have more of these scam ads proliferating the net?
Stay tuned for new sig...
How do they make money?
I you want to learn a lot about civil disobedience, web search "civil disobedience carl cohen howard zinn" - and I note that for once I didn't say to google it.
I studied under Carl Cohen - and highly recommend reading everything by him and Zinn if you want clear thinking on this topic.
The act of overloading Google with this plan is something that I personally find quite laudable - but it is not civil disobedience. As an ancient hippie, I don't mind saying that this act is simply called, Sticking It To The Man . I'm saddened that today's Man-Stickers are so inundated with political correctness that they can't call an action for what it is.
As Carl might have said - they emasculate their argument by so doing.
FWIW, it's not the summary - the stupidity of calling it civil disobedience comes right from TFA.
Pathological kinda promises Path + Logical - but instead, you get stuck with pathetic.
The smart thing for Google to do would be to completely ignore the program, and let advertisers use their usual click-fraud dispute resolution mechanism. By fighting the program, Google would only be giving the program legitimacy. Without the "I'm being oppressed" notoriety, the program will pick up very few users and the total effect on the market will be small.
I'm not against advertising. I'm against fraudulent, manipulative, and obstructive advertising. Google AdWords typically score relatively low on all three counts, so they're fine with me.
Seriously - how much money does it take to operate google?
What percentage of internet users use google every day?
These 'free' services aren't there 'because someone out there loves us and wants to give us this stuff for free'. They make money off of it.
How? Ads. Don't like it? Don't use google products. Cancel your gmail accounts, wipe your igoogle page, delete your calenders, office docs, etc.
For that matter, never visit another site with ads. Sure, it's your bandwidth, but the ads take up a diminishingly small amount of that. Especially google's ads.
Many sites sell /nothing/, few donate, and bandwidth is expensive. Let alone racks of servers, etc. If some people click on ads, great.
Frankly, I don't mind - I'd love to NEVER see another ad that I could care less about.
Frankly, I think Adbuster's is being childish about this entire thing. If they want to limit themselves to ad free sites, go for it.
Google is specifically making this easy for users. Heck, I'll be able to edit what types of ads I want to see! Mind you, I'm not excited about ads, and have never clicked one, but I'd rather see ads based on what I'm interested in (IT, games primarily) rather than online dating or vacations or get a bigger penis.
This entire 'uproar' is a bunch of pointless FUD.
Please test it on my site! So that I may become rich on this amazing pyramid scheme? Undead Computing
It's all fun and games till someone divides by 0. Then it's hilarious.
Adbusters is just as much a brand as Google, Coke, Wal-Mart of any of the other corporations they criticize. They will probably try to sell you some special hipster indie cred mouse soon. They may have a point but I'm too poor to afford them.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Automatically clicking on all adds is a bad idea. It would be very easy for google to sort that out. It would be smarter to have it "click "on random ads once every few searches.
A better bit would be a Firefox plugin (you can't do greasemonkey, it needs to be lower down) that just strips all references to google adwords, analytics, and doubleclick and replaces them with noops.
Now google can't track you and you don't see the adds.
While the "clickfraud" solution sounds cute, those are easy easy to detect and Google will just ignore those clicks.
Test your net with Netalyzr
As noted in the second comment in the posted article, Adbusters is using Google Analytics for user tracking. It doesn't seem like Adbusters is really concerned about this issue whatsoever if they allow Google to violate their own users' privacy, all while encouraging click fraud. What is Adbusters thinking?
Assuming Adbusters' goal is to eliminate ads, wouldn't something like Adblock be a more productive approach? Or at the very least, just clearing all but whitelisted cookies every session? When the technological solution works, there's no need for protest or laws.
Doesn't "fraud" imply doing something for your own financial gain? What they're talking about is noise injection, trendily known as "culture jamming."
You don't get sued for culture jamming; you do get sued for fraud. One term sounds criminal (where everyone will say you're the bad guy) and the other sounds subversive (where people will split on whether you're the bad guy or the good guy).
Poor choice of words on adbusters' part.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Would you "click" the red hole in my anus?
Yeah, but "culture jamming" sounds like a new music genre or a skateboard move, so Joe Q Sixpack will ignore it, especially coming from Adbusters. "Fraud" sounds like a grown-up topic, so Joe Q Sixpack (and maybe some CEOs somewhere) may actually pay attention to whatever the hell this "Adbusters" thing is.
Larry and Sergey brought in Eric to inject some "business gravitas" into Google. Looks like the heady idealism of youth is gone from the company, for good.
The community hasn't yet finished slaying the *last* evil corporate monolith. Now, the next one has finished its grotesque metamorphosis on the tech landscape. An ill omen indeed.
to track users even more with cookies and the privacy implications.
Tools -> Clear Private Data...
You can't take the sky from me...
Google won't be the one hurt here, nor will it be the advertisers. It'll be the poor fools who host ads and attract such a user base that would willingly screw them over.
Have your site pegged as one committing click fraud, and your account is yanked. It'll be up to them to prove to Google that they were victims here, while their legitimately earned ad revenues trickle away.
This makes my brain hurt, teh implications, teh possibilities legal and otherwise...
i think i have to defer comment and opinion until some experts wander in (are we allowed to do that here? Will my account be locked? ,-) ).
What does strike me is Protest 2.0.
SysAlert: new protest available. Download? [Y/N] > y
........... done.
Run protest? [Y/N] > y
Protest running.
Of course, i'm gonna complain that no one can be arsed to actually do anything any more, aren't i? And i advocate automation and interfacing with other systems - literally, figuratively, politically, socially, mechanically - whenever possible. So is this looking-askance at Protest.sh a little Luddite slipping in in my old age? Or will it just encourage MORE laziness - oh, if i don't have a button to press, i can't be arsed so prepackage my activism please.
Brain hurts again :P
That which does not kill us makes us... st
this is a terrible idea. it won't hurt google at all, and will simply get honest web sites banned from the AdSense service. There is essentially no recourse once you're banned so doing this would essentially be disaterous for any site you do it on.
about 3 years back, my buddies and I set up our website with google ads. Apparently, some of our users thought they'd "help us out" by clicking repeatedly. within a week we had been banned from Adsense - and we didn't even know what had happened.
We immediately told our users NOT to do that, and contacted adsense about the situation, and informing them that it had been resolved, and we didn't want the fraudulently obtained payout. Google failed to acknowledge the request, and then banned the personal account of one of the website staff.
we have not been able to get so much as a word out of google since.
You want to protest google, fine, do it in a way that hurts GOOGLE, not their end-users.
I don't understand this "protest." Google, apparently the target of the protest, gets increased ad revenues, whereas small businesses like mine that use Adsense get... Thousands of dollars in additional advertising costs that are designed to generate no revenue...?
I admit it -- my small jewelry store (beadstore.com) is not a particularly sophisticated Google customer. I think in 2007, we spent maybe $10,000 over the course of a year advertising on Google. (Since then, we've scaled back considerably -- even though it increased business, cash flow concerns made it impossible to continue.)
After we started, I handed off control of the budget to someone who didn't quite understand the limits system properly (they're beaders, after all, not techies). She racked up almost a thousand dollars in costs in a single week. Eek! A potentially devestating mistake, since $1,000 in unexpected expenses is a huge amount for a little company like ours. (We learned our lesson and made sure everyone understood the system pronto.)
Fortunately -- and I'm sure not coincidently -- that week was also one of our biggest grossing weeks ever (though it probably didn't cover the additional advertising costs, at least over the short run). I don't know what we would have done had those costs been driven by non-customers clicking through in some misguided attempt to hurt Google. I'm not looking for sympathy for people who screw up, or suggesting that all Google advertisers are like us, but please remember that a single click can still cost a dollar or more, so a few fraudulent clicks really hurts. Not only does it inflate your advertising costs, but it also denies us of legitimate potential customers (since the system is designed to remove the ads once your target budget is reached). And I suspect we would never know for sure whether we just had a really low click-to-purchase ratio for a given week, or whether we were the victims of an organized fraud (in the non-legal sense, anyway).
Lastly, Google claims that multiple clicks from the same IP address are filtered out -- of course, I have no idea if their system would prevent what these people are suggesting.
If you object to Googles privacy policy, then do not use any Google services.
This does not mean, use them through an anonymous proxy as that is theft, this means do not use them at all. Use an entirely free search engine that works just as well with a better privacy policy. Google make money through advertising, as do all large scale search engines. That is how they are able offer a service and not charge for it. There might be smaller free services that have a better privacy policy but would they still be free if they could put up with the load google is able to? The amount google must spend on staff and hardware must be obscene.
I dont read
attention, profit, fame or what ever else that they are after.
Its getting old.
Especially when it is done by people that are completely ignorant of what they are talking about.
and when this scheme fizzles out what then?
how many legitimate clicks does Google register each hour, each day? are you really going to rise above the noise level?
success btw implies that google could be brought down by anyone, at any time, for any reason.
how they must be laughing in redmond right now!
I love reading the Adbusters mag. Really smart stuff. Those guys should be in marketing.
force Google to adopt a pro-privacy corporate policy?
google IS an advertising company! that's essentially their whole reason for existing. to sell eyeballs to advertisers.
who's kidding who? google is in this for the love of mankind? get real.
expect NO privacy when advertising is involved. doubleclick should be the obvious tip-off if there ever was one. anything that DC touches turns to shit, google included. just give it time - you'll find that google is engaging in 'slow cooking of the frog' (or lobster). you won't notice it over night but compare the 'do no evil' google when they first started to how they are now. big difference. only going to get bigger as time progresses and they hook more people into their 'free' services.
just go into it with open eyes and ALWAYS ask 'where's the money?'. you'll find the reason for their existance is to sell data on you - PERIOD. all else is a ruse.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
"Adbusters gives Google a perfect opportunity to sue for tortious interference with business operation"
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Automated clicking of all ads would be statistically detectable. Better just to stop using Google.
I don't need no GreaseMonkey script - I already click on all the ads visible :)
sounds like a relatively cheap way to have a site's ad revenue choked off,
click-fraud it into banned-from-adwords hell.
0.0.0.0 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
Instead of launching a DOS attack on google(that might just make google more money) over the TOS, why not use Microsoft or Yahoo search until they fix it? It's not like Google is the only search provider in the world.
Hikery.net - The best hiking site ever. Made by yours truly.
This "protest" could, on the other hand, give Google some really good material from which to refine their click fraud detection algorithms. They know the click-fraud is coming, and they can use it as a chance to collect even more accurate data about how the click fraud is being perpetrated.
I can't tell if this is win-win for everyone or not. The protesters get to have their protest, Google comes away with better click fraud detection, and the advertisers subsequently get better results for their money spent. Who's losing here?
I'm a cautious supporter of Adbusters, but I actually took google's ads out of my hosts file's filter list.
My reasoning is that I believe, after years of studying media and communications, that advertising can only be ethical if it resembles the directory that you find in a phone book, accompanied by an honest, vetted description. Otherwise, it is rhetorically manipulative and preys on the uninformed.
Now, while google's ads aren't perfect, they hew closer to this ideal than most other forms of advertising. The lack of emotionally manipulative visual imagery helps (I make a living messing with such imagery, BTW).
I don't trust Google, the company. I am opposed to their excessive privacy abuse. However, I balance that against their general model, and find the competition worse.
I won't support adbusters in this campaign, but I don't oppose it either.
Damn those pesky terrorists
This stuff really pisses me off. Google use to hide their dirty little perversions using an onclick event and I had a GM script to disable it.
Now they don't even bother hiding it. But that's OK because we have Firefox and GreaseMonkey and we can just Make It Go Away®
New greasemonkey script to cleanup all of the googly perverted URLs. Enjoy.
How about you just stop using the internet. Stop reading newspapers and magazines because they track where the best distributions locations are, stop going to the super market (because they track what you buy and adjust product pricing and location accordingly) and stop buying adbusters because they sell advertising. I am no fan of google, but civil disobedience because you don't like what a FREE service provider does is silly. Now if Adbusters really wants to make a point- how about they ask to be removed from google searches?
I don't see many ads anywhere. I run AtGuard. On occasion, something slips through because they use really weird tags or flash or whatever. I set my hosts file to resolve name lookups for them to me. My firewall blocks IP ranges for most of the big ad servers.
What if we, advertisers, refuses to pay our Google AdWords bills and just suspend all our campaigns while adbusters people exists.
I refuse to pay more AdWords if Google doesn't put in jail those criminals.
Go to adbusters.org and "view the page source" and at the end you can see Google Analytics code.
What is this? They complaint that ads are tracking users and they put the father of Google's tracking code into their site?????
These people are not serious!
How about if you just click on none of the ads? It's not rocket science.
"What's wrong with people these days?"
It's called moral relativism. Many people believe that something is wrong when someone else does it, but OK whey they do it (because they are doing it for a good reason or what the fuck ever). It stems from a lack of desire to think rationally and accept truth. The best example is when people say that it okay to be intolerant intolerant views. I'm not sure how it works, but I am told this is a totally rational, non-hypocritical viewpoint. I say it's bullshit.
> Executive Order 28253 clearly states that you do have to drink Fizzy Drinks.
Yeah, but loyal citizens all drink Bouncy Bubble Beverage (B3), anyhow. You are a loyal citizen, aren't you?
/me stops his adwords campaigns.
Has anyone thought about how this will hurt their customer base? Such a tactic will hurt us little guys that can barely afford advertising as it is. :\
as i am reading the comments, trying to think up something snarky...this pops into the old inbox:
Hi, We're writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site's privacy policies. You'll also see some new options on your Account Settings page. Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user's previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. "sports enthusiast"). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the "sports enthusiast" interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310. As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site's privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we're unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language. For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html. We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement. Sincerely, The Google AdSense Team Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account. Google Inc. 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View, CA 94043
FEAR THE GOOGLE!
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton
Why not simply create an online petition? They're not always that effective, but it is a non-destructive way to get thousands of people to show they don't like it. Facebook groups seem to be all the rage as well.
If you explain in simple terms to the average internet user that your online browsing habits are being logged by a company who is attempting to monetize that information, possibly share it with 3rd party companies, it has no expiration date and the data can be associated with you and turned over to law enforcement, I'm sure people would be concerned.
This is just typical google arrogance though - when you're on top, you can afford to ignore everyone. Not like there are any real alternatives with as many features or search result quality.
I personally just block the cookies, though I can envision a future where if you don't allow tracking cookies as they like, you aren't allowed to use their service. That will happen.
I wouldn't use the autoclick stuff for fear that small companies that use adsense would have to foot the bill. Which is a sucky thing to do - if you're using a service, you have to put up with their lameness. You can protest etc, but it's your choice to use that service.
It'll be interesting to see what eventually happens to these huge portals that arguably "are" the web these days.
Need an automatic screenshot taker? Try here.
Much as I like Adbusters, this is a headache.
Right now, Google ad URLs are relatively straightforward to recognize and decode. If Google sees this as a real threat, they may start obfuscating them and using elaborate gimmickry with Javascript, like the stuff one sees in hostile web pages. Then they'll be much tougher to deal with. The easy approaches to ad blocking will stop working.
We recognize Google ad URLs in AdRater, which is a Firefox plug-in, and we put a translucent rating icon atop each ad. Google ad links are currently rather straightforward to decode, so we don't have to follow them, just examine them. For some of Google's competitors, you can't tell where the ad link is going without clicking on it. We've considered a plug-in which follows encoded ad links in the browser, but it would look like click fraud, even though it has a legitimate purpose. So far, we've refrained from doing that. If Google tries obfuscating their ad URLs, we'll have to actually traverse them to find the advertiser site for rating purposes. That increases everyone's overhead.
If someone really wanted to mess with them, make an auto click system that pipes through Tor somehow...causing the IP addresses to appear to come from all over the world.
I'm sure there are some technical issues, but it would make more work for Google.
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
If these people hate this service so much, then why don't they just opt-out of it, or use a competitors services? (No, I'm not going to suggest ad block. I know it's very popular with this crowd, but if you like the Internet you ought to consider, you know, supporting it. And like it or not, ads support most of the content on the Internet. If you don't like advertising-supported services, then don't use them.)
I understand that this is not just one site, so it's not like they can boycott just Google search. But if they represent a serious movement then they ought to be able to cause a significant shift in traffic away from Google's services. If they can't, then they should accept their minority opinion status.
This is not civil disobedience. This is not "active refusal to obey certain laws, demands or commands." This isn't even vigilantism, as there is no law they are purporting to uphold.
What this is, is fraud. Plain and simple. And ad busters should be ashamed for promoting it.
Make an "ad preloader" that will pre-fetch all ads on the page IN ADVANCE. This helps the advertisers because you can quickly view the cached pages on your hard drive and decide which products you would like to purchase.
How can this be illegal?
Never click on any ad ever...
Even if you get a referral from a website, like a price crawler, just type in the native url in a new browser. I simply don't support web advertising ever.
If there is no identifiable revenue, then then ads will eventually disappear. Muhahhahhha.
But I'm not bitter...
Didn't see this posted earlier but here's the link for opting-out of the DoubleClick DART tracking: http://www.google.com/ads/preferences/plugin/
JAGga.me ----> Producing video games addressing emotional health and wellness issues affecting teens.
Why does it always seem universally agreed upon that advertising is lame? It's one of the top ways I find out about products I enjoy.
... stick it to the man by boycotting the SOB. Block google's ad servers, safe browsing service, and analytics via your favorite web filtering widget (I use squid, myself) and don't conduct your web searches at google.com (I don't). Don't buy their ads, or from those who have bought them (I don't).
Futzing around with their ads just annoys them while boycotting them decreases their profits. Which do you suppose is more likely to be noticed by the board of directors?
Warning: This signature may offend some viewers.
CustomizeGoogle FF extension can removes ads, click tracking, etc... They can't do these things to the visitor if they shielded from it. NoScript, also, can block AdSense. Let this be a education movement on the tools that can protect and tailor web experiences. I fail to see a problem, since people are not forced to use a service they don't want done to them if they can block it, whether it be via a firewall filter, proxy, host denial entry, or easy to use browser extensions.
Ain't nothin' like givin' a company money for somethin' in order to stop them from doin' it. Yeah. That'll really show em. And using Noscript and Cookie Monster definitely won't show em at all. Actually stopping their program from even seeing your browsing habits won't give them the money to show them that their actions aren't profitable, because they really wan't to never see a profit. Yeah, they're scared of money. Oh, wait... Hold on a sec... I believe everything I just said was really stupid. Maybe. Nah. You show em. That's right. Throw money their way. Stick it to the man.
I don't want to undermine the protest against the general creep of privacy invasion, but this should also be seen as a call to use aliases, TOR, proxy servers, incognito, or the like anytime you search for something potentially sensitive. I like posting under my real name, but I've started posting more political/taboo musings under aliases, which also develop their own reputations. My IP address is still recorded somewhere, but what I'm saying is not so bad. And yes, I know I'm late to the alias game . . . For the more revolutionary stuff that the NSA or the like *might* find interesting one day, I use incognito (TOR). Having a net where I didn't have to do this would be great, but depending on corporations words that they don't record IP addresses, etc., is producing a situation even more dangerous, one in which there is a false sense of security.
Adbusters is a truly pathological publication. You buy a copy for $8.99 at a bookstore and get two extremely terse paragraphs on the October Revolution and interviews with well-coiffed third-stream intellectuals. This isn't to say there isn't a payoff: also included are 6 pages of pretty pictures to accompany the article, many of which have nothing to do with the October revolution, but manage to go a long way toward proving Adbusters supports revolution. And you will too, once you buy the magazine, buy the plastic-bottle shoes, and buy into the illusion that Adbusters actually cares. Insurrection this, insurrection that. If, on the off-chance, that insurrection is on the scale they image, a new October 1917 like their publication so cavalierly glosses, Adbusters would likely be one of the first called into question as counterrevolutionary due to their self-conscious posturing and content that is little more than sanctimonious drivel.
NOW - if Adbusters really cared about government surveillance, they probably should have kept their pens silent and not hopped on the persecution of this boogeyman of the month. For let us not forget the amount of insane surveillance goes into producing an issue of Adbusters. The mag's writers, for purposes of research and science, habitually sneak into parties (usually it's parties, but if you're lucky it's a cultural event of some kind), unannounced, sensing the "mental environment," and writing drivel about it a magazine whose title and content could be summed "How to be cool for the next two months until the next issue comes out."
I doubt there are many out there who aren't very passionate about keeping personal information private, but Adbusters is really calling the kettle black on this one. Wrong forum.
I've heard many people claim a "moral wrong" in blocking ads. How they get to this, I really don't know.....
Advertising, unless you explicitly ask for it, is unwanted. Advertisers are solicitors: They are asking for money in return for a service or product. Charities, although not offering a product or service, are still asking for money and are also solicitors.
Consider this: You are sitting on a park bench reading SlashDot. Later, someone else comes over and sits next to you, and starts talking to you. You aren't interested in any products or services he's offering, and ask him to stop. He refuses. You again ask him to stop. He continues to refuse. You put on a pair of earplugs, the kind they use at shooting ranges, to block out the drivel you don't want to listen to. Is this wrong? Absolutely not. It may be a public place, but ignoring the stranger is legal, while harassing someone for a sale or panhandling, is not. However, one nations' laws cannot be enforced in another nation.
AdBlocking is the Internet equivalent of earplugs. It is also the equivalent of saying "Leave me alone! I don't want to listen to you and I'm not going to buy anything from you!". You you shouldn't have to listen to an ENDLESS FLOOD of sales pitches, product offers, "Special 1-Day Deals", porn ads, and "You are the 1 Millionth Visitor!" that you don't want to.
I have heard a seemingly endless number of arguments that claim AdBlocking is stealing. Stealing? Not at all. Stealing is when you take something from someone else and keep it as your own. By AdBlocking, you aren't taking anything from the site operator and keeping for yourself. You may be costing them clickstream revenue, but your are not stealing since you aren't getting anything in from it.
Someone should cook up a script that sends the site operator a message that says "I don't want your stinking ads!" whenever it detects, and blocks, ads.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I only see this making profit for Google and hurting the web developers who legally pay for advertising.
Perhaps it undermines Google's info collection scheme, but it also undermines the right of an advertiser.
So, I decided to improve the script a little bit, this should clearly point out the stupidity in a script like this.
http://pastebin.com/f6ed62f77
Firefox lets us allow cookies (totally), allow for the session (entire time it runs) or deny them.
What we need is another setting on this knob: give me a new cookie every time I visit this URL.
That way everytime you go to www.google.com, your browser acts like it doesn't have a cookie and google gives you a new one. You don't tell google you've deleted the old one, of course.
That might cause google a few more problems with their database :) In fact, I'd like that cookie to be the default setting for www.google.com when firefox-next ships.
Running a small, anonymising squid at home can take care of the "too much information in the HTTP header" problem.
But really the whole mission statement of Adbusters is stupid. Removing all ads from the internet will destroy pretty much every service on the internet. Think youtube would be profitable without ads? How about any site you visit with alot of images. Bandwidth isn't free so sites make money from either ads, donations or memberships. Most sites with memberships remove the ads for you so this goal is STUPID. Just use Adblock if you hate them so much
"We are a global network of artists, activists, writers, pranksters, students, educators and entrepreneurs who want to advance the new social activist movement of the information age. Our aim is to topple existing power structures and forge a major shift in the way we will live in the 21st century. To this end, Adbusters Media Foundation publishes Adbusters magazine, operates this website and offers its creative services through PowerShift, our advocacy advertising agency."
- http://www.adbusters.org/about/adbusters
I personally am still weighing the pros and cons of the clickfraud approach, but the comment that your post is FUD is spot-on.
Slashdot? Oh, I just read it for the articles.
What strikes me is what is obviously missing in Adbuster's paper. They say Google is bad, but don't even mention the possibility to switch to another search engine. There is none, no list could be provided.
They must not hate Google in the end.
OK, the impact of n Adbusters users leaving Google may be harder to track than staying and clicking everywhere. Yes. For those who 1) use Firefox + 2) have broadband access + 3) install the extension. /. users will do this. And, 0.003% of the rest of the world.
I'd say, 50% of
My advice: use Clusty. The only one that sometimes indeed is more efficient, thanks to clustering.
http://clusty.com/
Herve S.
You know, for all the kvetching about Slashdot groupthink, the only consistent observation I've noticed is that talking about being modded down for your daring, iconoclastic views is the surest way to get modded up.
How lonely the life of a brave critic of the leftist dictatorship must be, eh?
We really need a "-1, Whining about the Cabal" mod.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Check out the HTML source for the adbusters link. Oops! Google tracking bug!
Set my sig page as your search.
If you want to fool Google engineers you better make the click on ads random, to the point that you might not click on on in a page anyhow.
While the script might register as protest at Google, their Click Fraud Filter screen out that case for sure. At best it drives their customers nuts, because they see larger discrepancies between their own counting and the number of clicks reported and charged for by Google. In that case Google's answer is "See how honest we are and how well our Click Fraud detection works!"
Busy helping non technical users of OpenOffice.org - http://plan-b-for-openoffice.org/
I don't agree but this is the counter-argument and not a troll.
I pay my internet provider for my access to the internet. Just like I pay my cable provider for my access to cable television.
I have no obligation to view the ads on television or to view them on the internet. It is not my fault that the content creators have chosen a business model that makes the false assumption that I am willing to view advertising.
Since I pay my internet provider for access to all the content on the internet, maybe they should be hitting up internet providers to pay for access to their content. How is that for net neutrality?
It's amazing, if you do something like that people might spend less, actually keep some of their fucking money, save it. Buy their house and car with money instead of credit and only pay the price of these things one time instead of ten and we might have a more balanced economy. More money in the hands of little people and less spending ultimately resulting in money pooling at the top.
Click fraud is a violation of Google's ToS. If they are disatisfied with google, they are countless other search engine to use.
The best adjective to describe these people's intentions and methods is "political".
They believe Google is some sort of collective property where everyone has some sort of right of say. This is wrong and evil on so many level it makes me want to puke.
\u262D = \u5350
I'd say less than 50 people from slashdot will do this. Which is effectively lower than your number for the rest of the world.
The whole premise behind it is retarded:
Google is bad, they track me using information I (or your browser) send to them, thats an invasion of privacy even though I'm (again, your web browser) telling them about it!
We're going to show them! Install this Firefox extension so that google can see you're clicking on every link in the pages! The best way to keep things private is to send more information to the ones who are tracking you!
And its Google, so we know they have no experience thwarting people who try to cheat their ranking systems. I mean lets face it PageRank is totally broken and always returns results for the domain squatters!!!
And because we're so super smart, and Google is so dumb, they'll have no chance against us because no one has ever tried this simple method click fraud on the Google AdSense network in the past!
So what have we learned?
1) People still don't get that its not private when you tell someone else about it on the Internet.
2) Adbusters is a joke and is so arrogant they think they have come up with a way to skew Googles traffic enough to make a difference, even though far more advanced methods have been used to attempt to game Google for years and have been almost useless.
3) The 3 people that do go along with Adbusters (not counting the 7 internal people they have, their 'staff' if you could call it that) aren't going to make enough of a dent in anyones logs for anyone to notice.
4) Before you come up with some retarded way to 'stick it to the man', take a look at your unintended side effects and hopefully realize before you do it that you are doing nothing more than hurting the services you enjoy, not the person you disagree with. Good thing here is that since we're only talking about 10 or 20 people that will actually make the effort to do this, that you won't be hurting those sites that use AdSense much (like good ol' slashdot).
Dear Adbusters,
Please get a clue. They have cluepons on the Internet if you need a discounted rate.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager